CHAPTER XIV EVOLUTION OF EQUITY IN THE UNITED STATES Nature of Equity. In modern society people have with one another relations which involve duties on each side. A husband is in duty bound to support and protect his wife; she is equally bound to safeguard and care for the home. Parents ought to support their children; children ought to obey their fathers and mothers. Persons who have the right to occupy real estate only during their lives ought not to tear down buildings or cut down timber or otherwise injure the property of those who will succeed them; the ultimate owners ought not to interfere with the use of the real estate by the life occupants. Buyers and sellers, mortgagors and mortgagees, trustees and beneficiaries of trusts, partners and copartners, principals and agents, employers and employees, landlords and tenants, each and all owe to one another duties that the law ought to safeguard. The common law provides remedies in the form of damages, which the courts assess against individuals who have failed to perform their legal duties; but the common law does not give any remedies, until after the failures have wrought injury. It does not interfere to prevent the injury from being inflicted. Cases are constantly arising in which the damages caused by such wrongful acts cannot be sufficiently adjusted by money awards. Consequently, there must be another form of law that will prevent those wrongful acts from being committed. That form of law is equity. In cases in which the common law does not provide a sufficient remedy, the injured party may have recourse to a court of equity. In these cases the equity courts compel persons to perform acts essential to justice and to refrain from acts contrary to justice. A court of equity may command a person to perform a contract or may prohibit him from committing an injurious act. If the seller of a farm refuses to deliver a deed, an equity court will direct him to do so, so that the buyer may be able to take possession and earn his living by cultivating the soil; the common law would give the buyer only the profit he might make by selling the land to someone else and would give no compensation for the inconvenience and loss through being deprived of his means of livelihood. Likewise, a court of equity will prohibit a person from carrying on a slaughtering business in the residence district of a city; whereas the common law would only award damages for the loss of value of the houses in the neighborhood but would not compensate the owners for having been forced either to live in a bad smelling neighborhood or to move. In the case of Watson v. Sutherland,' decided in 1866, the U. S. Supreme Court applied the rule that equity jurisdiction exists only when there is no sufficient remedy at law. That case was a proceeding in equity by which the petitioner had asked the U. S. Circuit Court of Maryland to forbid the sale of the stock in trade of a business concern under judgments that had 1 5 Wallace (U. S.) Rep., 74, 78. been obtained by its creditors. The petitioner contended that he had purchased this stock in trade from the insolvents, and that, if the creditors were not prevented from selling it, he would be ruined. The creditors answered by alleging that the sale to the petitioner was fraudulent and had been made in order to cheat them, and that, even if the sale was not fraudulent, the petitioner had a plain, complete, and adequate remedy at law, and had no right to relief in equity. The circuit court ruled in favor of the petitioner and granted him the restraining order he had asked for. The creditors then took the case to the U. S. Supreme Court by a writ of error. In deciding that the case was one in which the petitioner had a right to sue in equity, Justice Davis said: It is contended that the injunction should have been refused, because there was a complete remedy at law. If the remedy at law is sufficient, equity cannot give relief, "but it is not enough that there is a remedy at law; it must be plain and adequate, or in other words, as practical and efficient to the ends of justice, and its prompt administration, as the remedy in equity" [Citing Boyce's Exor. v. Grundy, 3 Peters 210]. How could Sutherland [the petitioner] be compensated at law, for the injuries he would suffer, should the grievances of which he complains be consummated? If the appellants made the levy, and prosecuted it in good faith, without circumstances of aggravation, in the honest belief that Wroth & Fullerton [the insolvent firm] owned the stock of goods (which they swear to in their answer), and it should turn out, in an action at law instituted by Sutherland for trepass, that the merchandise belonged exclusively to him, it is well settled that the measure of damages, if the property were not sold, could not extend beyond the injury done to it, or, if sold, to the |